The Tavern

The vampire blood clock is like 20x worse than the normal food clock for basically no reason. Whether it's fucking off from spider to go kill some orcs you stashed, quaffing blood to regen and then fiving so you go bloodless again, or constantly chugging potions all game so that you stay at high satiation, the blood clock is awful no matter what your character is trying to do. Previous simplifications have not done anything to fix this.

I propose the following:
Vampires have exactly two states, undead/bloodless and alive/almost alive/whatever the hell you want to call it. The undead state is exactly like current bloodless except "no regen" is replaced with "no regen with monsters in line of sight" and you don't sometimes change states when you stab enemies. The alive state provides the same benefits as the current alive state, or satiated I guess if alive is "too good" (lol). You can switch between states freely as a delayed (5 turns or whatever) action. Batform is usable in both states. Since batform is broken as fuck and also pretty annoying, I suggest putting the ability on some sort of exp timeout when activated, letting the player cancel it whenever but not allowing them to enter it again until gaining sufficient exp. Vampires either don't have a food clock or have a normal food clock in both forms. I think this preserves the parts of vampire that people actually enjoy and removes the worst parts.

Alternative thankbait solution: remove vampire.

I would have thanked but I don't like the alternative thankbait solution... :)

How about giving Vampires slow regen and rF- when Bloodless instead of no regen? I don't think anyone considers Mummies overpowered.

Maybe this species could be called something else than vampire, since it doesn't bite or drink blood. How about revenant? From my pov, the vampire niche has been taken by vine stalker. So this is actually a "swap between undead and alive" niche, rather than vampiric. There must be other undead that are good for the concept.

Otherwise, I think it's cool. I'd give wisp form instead of bat form, but it's just to see how that would work out.

I'm with you on my dislike for the species, and I find that my attempts to win one are just a 'check-the-box' exercise. The things they excel at are not play styles I enjoy in the early game (Hexes/Stabs), and I get tired of feeling compelled to choose Makhleb every time just because the game *might* roll Spider's Nest. Kiku's active abilities are more fun to play with in my opinion but even in Spider, you don't get any corpses you can bottle blood from, right?

I suppose that leaves Ru and Yred as the gods who can provide heals-on-demand in Spider's Nest when blood is unavailable, but both of those gods' HP-producing abilities are not really spammable. Maybe a Vp with the Vampiric Draining spell AND Ru's "Draw Out Power" might make Spider tolerable; I've never gotten to a rune branch with a VP of Ru before so can't comment with any authority.

I do love the innate sInv from turn 1 though, and the Hexes & Stealth aptitudes I find fun to build into eventually for general purpose disabling or avoidance of threats. So the species has SOME redeeming qualities to me, but the food/nutrition aspects of Vp are horribly tedious. I'd be entirely fine with Vp merging somehow with either Deep Dwarf or Vine Stalker.

I'm with you on my dislike for the species, and I find that my attempts to win one are just a 'check-the-box' exercise. The things they excel at are not play styles I enjoy in the early game (Hexes/Stabs), and I get tired of feeling compelled to choose Makhleb every time just because the game *might* roll Spider's Nest. Kiku's active abilities are more fun to play with in my opinion but even in Spider, you don't get any corpses you can bottle blood from, right?

I suppose that leaves Ru and Yred as the gods who can provide heals-on-demand in Spider's Nest when blood is unavailable, but both of those gods' HP-producing abilities are not really spammable. Maybe a Vp with the Vampiric Draining spell AND Ru's "Draw Out Power" might make Spider tolerable; I've never gotten to a rune branch with a VP of Ru before so can't comment with any authority.

I do love the innate sInv from turn 1 though, and the Hexes & Stealth aptitudes I find fun to build into eventually for general purpose disabling or avoidance of threats. So the species has SOME redeeming qualities to me, but the food/nutrition aspects of Vp are horribly tedious. I'd be entirely fine with Vp merging somehow with either Deep Dwarf or Vine Stalker.

One other thought around my mental block of "avoid choosing Vampire because of Spider's Nest": Maybe change Spider's Nest to include some humanoid type monsters like a monster-version of Formicids, or some other kinds of 'burrowing'-themed animals. If the flavor of the branch must be kept as "things that live in tunnels", there's probably more that could be done to make the branch not such a pain in the ass for Vampires. We already have one species (DD) that is quite boxed-in to a handful of gods for the majority of a 3-rune game. Either modifying Vp's nutrition/regeneration gimmick OR a tweak to the Spider's Nest monster roster would be welcome in my opinion.

I find that blood potions last long enough to do the entirety of Spider anyway.

If that mental block needs to be solved, surely it would be better to simply allow Vp to feed from insects and spiders, rather than add even more monsters. Spiders have blood.

if you want to get really fucking technical spiders have hemolymph instead of blood, but like, c'mon

I haven't really through about this much, but one easy solution comes to mind: don't have potions of blood disappear from inventory.

You are not compelled to do anything like that. The silly restriction can be avoided completely by leaving a few monsters alive in Lair. With Kiku, it's even easier: you just travel to the entrance to Spider (in Lair) and receive corpses.

It should be called "ghoul form".

Thanks guys for some tips about Spider’s Nest. Leaving a block of monsters alive as a “supply depot” didn’t even cross my mind before. Seems easy enough to leave, say, 1/2 of a single Lair level uncleared for this purpose.

I'm for renaming Vampires into something different, as I find that Vampires as race don't make sense in first place. So I'm partly fine with the thankbait solution. Or that they change into a class. Or maybe one can contract vampirism during the game with fitting races.

The big question, from both a mechanics and flavor perspective, is what do vampires do?

- Fangs, which like most flavor mutations work pretty well
- Bat transformation, which complements the hexer gameplay style by providing a needed escape mechanism
- Blood drinking, which is a fundamental part of vampire lore but is poorly implemented even by hunger mechanic standards
- Transformation between living and dead based on satiation, which from a gameplay standpoint requires constant micromanagement of fiddly hunger mechanics for entirely situational benefits (resists) and is more associated with The Elder Scrolls 4 than general vampire lore
- Stealth
- Enchanting

In lore vampires tend to have superhuman strength, resiliency, and regeneration, although Vp doesn't do anything with this beyond some extra regeneration when full.

Some other aspects of vampire lore that would make good crawl mechanics are already taken by other species/gods
- Darkness, jumping out of the shadows, turning into a mist (Dithmenos)
- Lifestealing (done better by Mahkleb, Vine Stalker, and to some extent Ghoul)
- Neither alive nor dead (Gargoyle)
- Forsaken by god (Demigod)
- Shooting fireballs (every race that doesn't have -3/-2 conj/fire)
- Wealth (Gozag)

The most pressing issue for the species is the hunger/satiation mechanic. Reducing it to two states is better but it's still a band-aid on a broken system that dominates the species experience without adding interesting gameplay. It might be most convenient to treat vampire as a typical chunk eating species that, like a gargoyle, is neither alive nor dead.



It mostly merges the benefits of being full and being thirsty, so it might require a slight nerf. The idea is to keep vampire in the role of the game's default hexer, keeping the high aptitudes for hexes, stealth, and short blades and (similar to Mf) bad aptitudes for armour and conjurations which prevent going full melee or full caster. They're kind of like spriggan-lite in that bat form allows them to escape if they get unlucky and confusion fails 5 times in a row, but the escape button doesn't fundamentally alter how the species plays.

I had another idea based around a bloodlust drawback sort of like a mesmerization that applies to every monster on the screen but there are a lot more complications to that then fitting vampire as the basic hexer.

As someone who's won vampire exactly once because I "had to" for greater player, I find any race that as a "no regen" state to be very tedious. DD has an alternative healing mechanic to make up for it, but how you're expected to heal on vampire is just too unreliable; as far as I know it's just healing on bites. I'm not sure if stabs also heal or if you're just biting as you stab, but in any case I don't think this healing is reliable enough to keep you healed on it's own. So I played my vampire as mostly alive, which makes it just another random "normal" race. Being undead and able to transmute is an interesting ability, but I'm not sure how practical it is to really invest in transmutations when there's a possibility that you'll lose access to them based on blood level. I suppose this can be solved with stashing monsters, but I'd really rather not ever test this personally.

I can see either a two state or one state (like cliffracer's above post) being a positive rework, but I'd like to first try to understand the 2 state version better. What's the goal of having two states? It seems to me that you'd want to build a character to a particular style, and then you're going to want to be in whatever state is better for that style. Is there a way to play a "true" vampire which wants to change states often?

Example one state builds:
Vampire with transmutations and unarmed: wants to always be alive. In fact, needs to always be alive or half your power is shut off.
Vampire enchanter with hexes who stabs: wants to be bloodless for the stealth, can mitigate the no regen because they both heal from stabs/bites and don't take any damage when they can put all monsters to sleep.

What's an example two state build? Who wants to shift to bloodless to deal with X pack, but then sees Y pack, and quickly switches to alive to take them more safely? And feel free to correct anything I've gotten horribly wrong here; like I said, I played vampire once just to check the box...

what if we just turn perma food into live chickens or something when vampires pick them up

Well, we could just have chicken instead of rations. Damn Spriggans...

I have to think the only time that would really be applicable would be if "Alive"-state vampires actually count as alive, rather than undead. That would at least give you the opportunity to chug a blood potion to dodge Dispel Undead or someone with a Holy Wrath brand. Otherwise the two states would have to have some significant differences.... such as maybe only being able to use bat form while alive?

None of this really fits the theme of a vampire at all though.

Took me a minute to find this thread, because the search function forbids "vampire" as "too common."

Thematically, vampires drinking blood shouldn't have implications for their alive-ness, or for their specific properties. It's enough that they drink blood and are undead. Of course, the thematic problem here is that you have an extended endgame that revolves around non-blooded things.

The existence of Potions/Bottles of Blood has always struck me a late-modern variation on the blood-drinking theme, so I don't think it really has a place in Crawl. It downplays the notion of the vampire as a scary, individual predator, in favor of a vampire that consumes commodities like everyone else. It also does away with the notion that vampires need to hunt and drink the blood of the *living*. Many of a vampire's thematic abilities are around mesmerizing, incapacitating, and drinking from living prey. Dracula didn't storm London, slaughtering people, and draining their corpses.

Worse, it's extremely anti-theme that a vampire would ever be better off with LESS blood. Like, "Oh, I'm going up against a demon that can cast Symbol of Torment, better make sure I have absolutely no blood at all." So at this point we've completely departed the "I drink blood" theme in favor of "I'm kinda like a mummy" thing.

So a vampire rework should incorporate these principles:

1. A vampire is never "alive." A vampire is always undead, and always has the same basic resistances/vulnerabilities/abilities.
2. Drinking blood should always be good, but only in the extremely short term, and not in a way that alters the vampire's basic features.
3. If drinking blood is always good, it can't always be available.
4. Vampires should be stalking living prey, not draining already-killed corpses.

Based on those principles, here's my idea:

-Baseline vampire is an undead creature with some level of non-living-type resistances and immunities (poison immunity, rNeg 3, torment resistance, etc). Vampires cannot eat food and heal slowly.
-Vampires have Nutrition, capped at X (no status display). At X/2, it displays "Thirsty." At X/4, "Very Thirsty." At 0, the vampire is "Entering Torpor."
-A vampire Entering Torpor is Slowed and can't heal.
-Vampires gain Nutrition from stabbing anything that isn't Unbreathing or Brainless. Get rid of potions of blood and get rid of drinking from corpses.
-On gaining Nutrition, vampires gain a "Bloodlust" buff that gives them a speed, agility, and regeneration boost for a short period of time.

So that leaves us with a vampire that isn't about becoming a pseudo-mummy and blasting everything with no hunger-spells, it's about a creature that has to incapacitate and stab things in order to drain life from them. Yes, that includes demons and other not-traditionally-alive things so long as they're not Unbreathing (should get all Undead?) or Brainless (should get plants and jelly-like things). Thematically, something has to give: either the vampire doesn't "drink" in extended, or extended needs a way to feed a vampire. Otherwise whatever consequences exist for not drinking just become extremely annoying, or permanent, in extended.

I would also be in favor of giving a vampire more forms to work with, but that's ancillary to solving the central problem of the food clock.

Reliance on stabs would be annoying and would create one of the most playstyle-constraining species in crawl, even more so than felid.

Absence that it's barely different from chunk reliance however.

Interesting that per the old discussion the poster talking about Kiku not working in spider didn't consider that you can simply walk back to lair and get corpses there to bottle more blood for a while. Lasts long enough that this isn't something necessary to repeat much.

One of the more odd things is that extended doesn't provide corpses. It's not clear why, as demons in principle have blood and this would spare ghouls/vampires from having such a large incentive to switch to Kiku.

Needing to stab something once every thousand turns isn't remotely close to "being a felid."

True, depending on how long taxing you make the food clock. But then you run into issues with food basically being a non-factor for them, including for spellcasting. If it is you're back to relying on magic to make getting food possible.

The ability to get food by magic should absolutely be removed, too. Obviously I already suggested corpses not be drainable, so perhaps Vp wouldn't be able to drink from live summons, either.

I moreso meant that stabbing requirement would force you to use magic to proc confusion, distraction, or higher tier stabs in order to secure food. Otherwise stealth is too unreliable to use consistently and dangerous enough to attempt in many cases that it's a false choice. Vp would therefore be effectively forced to run magic to attain food via the stabs.

Magic, or one of the many gods that end up causing confusion / distraction / etc.

Actually, the more I think on it... vampires should probably just be removed. The problem is that their fundamental mechanic is tied to food, yet that's something that's been pushed more and more into the background of Crawl. There's already a race that is just "I don't have to eat" (mummies), leaving Vampires in the "I kinda don't have to eat, except I kinda do, it really depends" situation.

Crawl isn't a game that has any space left for some kind of nuanced and interesting vampire-like behavior. Just ditch them.

Could always just remove the fiddly food system (make blood bottles permafood and greatly simplify their nutrition so you don't care about being bloodless on purpose) and give them a totally DIFFERENT gimmick instead.

Like, some kind of HP drain or buff on killing things, or a short-lasting buff if you feed on a corpse (which would take one turn, so it's viable mid-fight), or a short buff via feeding on a still living enemy even.

I agree, making vampires use rations the same way as other races, with a cosmetic change in the tiles icon and description to make them seem like blood bottles seems like the best option.



Again, good idea, as long as the buff is removed when the player uses stairs to prevent it being abused.

Ideally the buff wouldn't last long enough in any of those cases for stairs to be a relevant problem. You generally want to rest after a battle (if it was on kill or via ability on a living target) and corpses don't last long.

Of course, feeding on corpses for a buff makes kiku an interesting option, but that requires worshipping kiku so it sounds pretty fair~